English | Jamaican
My Mother is Jamaican and my Father is White English. I think sadly being mixed-race has been the most significant factor in my mental health and probably most of the choices I have made. I was an irritatingly bright and eager child and was so keen to get out and engage with the world, but my first experience of any other children was this horrendous and unfathomable rejection and nastiness. And that message that I was filthy and shouldn’t exist, like some sort of mongrel, and that there was nothing in me that was loveable or good was pretty constant throughout my childhood and teens. I felt that I had no place anywhere. The racial abuse was severe and took many forms, and I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD as a result. I have been in therapy for years and feel that I have made a lot of progress during the last few years, mainly because of the increasing diversity of voices in social media and slowly but surely in the wider world. I have always been between races, between classes, between urban and rural. I am not part of any of it and have to prove/justify my presence in any space, in any room, in any sphere. The upside of this is that I am equally comfortable/uncomfortable in any of these spaces. I don’t know what it is to be accepted and given credibility on face value, so I can operate in any environment within needing that. I claim it out of my own self. The way I value people, friends, colleagues, lovers, is based on what they do. How fairly things work for everyone, or not. How effectively things work. I find I can frame things from many perspectives. I am less likely to go along with groupthink because I am part of no group. If I had the opportunity to be reborn I would only want to come back as a Black mixed-race in a different world to the one we live in now. I’m tired. I’d like to be less singular. I’d like to be like a fish in a shoal, some acceptance that I don’t feel I need to earn. And I’d like there to be somewhere in that world where I’m not a minority, just to see how that feels.
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